This class is recommended for cases where the number of elements in a dictionary is unknown. It takes advantage of the improved performance of a ListDictionary with small collections, and offers the flexibility of switching to a Hashtable which handles larger collections better than ListDictionary.

If the initial size of the collection is greater than the optimal size for a ListDictionary, the collection is stored in a Hashtable to avoid the overhead of copying elements from the ListDictionary to a Hashtable.

The constructor accepts a Boolean parameter that allows the user to specify whether the collection ignores the case when comparing strings. If the collection is case-sensitive, it uses the key's implementations of Object.GetHashCode and Object.Equals. If the collection is case-insensitive, it performs a simple ordinal case-insensitive comparison, which obeys the casing rules of the invariant culture only. By default, the collection is case-sensitive. For more information on the invariant culture, see System.Globalization.CultureInfo.

A key cannot be a null reference (Nothing in Visual Basic), but a value can.

The foreach statement of the C# language (for each in Visual Basic) requires the type of each element in the collection. Since each element of the HybridDictionary is a key/value pair, the element type is not the type of the key or the type of the value. Instead, the element type is DictionaryEntry. For example:

Public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

This implementation does not provide a synchronized (thread safe) wrapper for a HybridDictionary, but derived classes can create their own synchronized versions of the HybridDictionary using the SyncRoot property.

Enumerating through a collection is intrinsically not a thread-safe procedure. Even when a collection is synchronized, other threads can still modify the collection, which causes the enumerator to throw an exception. To guarantee thread safety during enumeration, you can either lock the collection during the entire enumeration or catch the exceptions resulting from changes made by other threads.